


Demons and Detectives: Craft Essay

by mothicalcreatures (laelreenia)



Series: Demons and Detectives [5]
Category: Pet Shop of Horrors
Genre: Craft Essay, Essays, Imported, Meta, Nonfiction, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 12:37:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16873047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laelreenia/pseuds/mothicalcreatures
Summary: Demons and Detectives: How Pet Shop of Horrors Subverts and Critiques Orientalism, Asian Exoticism, and the Chinatown of the Detective Noir Genre.Presenting the craft essay for my Demons and Detectives series.





	Demons and Detectives: Craft Essay

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all, so after seeing a post on Tumblr reminding me that Ao3 is for all written fanworks, including the nonfiction ones, provided they are properly tagged. Here is the craft essay that went along with the four fics in my Demon's and Detectives series. 
> 
> It is a bit sparse because I had a word limit and it is a craft essay, which is much more casual and was presented as an explanation for my choices in the fics and therefore not an analytical essay in it's own write.
> 
> However, if there is interest in seeing this furthered I am open to doing so.

 

**The Stories**

A good friend of mine calls each chapter of _Pet Shop of Horrors_ individual morality plays and I have found that holds true with the stories that I’ve looked at with the fics I’ve written. The five chapters that I refer to in these fics are:

Volume 1, chapter 3, “Daughter” in "nothing but a clown"

Volume 1 chapter 1, “Dream” in "of a feather"

Volume 1, chapter 3, “Daughter” and volume 10, chapter 1 and 2, “Departure” and “Disappearance” in "the truth about stories"

And volume 10, chapters 2 and 4, “Disappearance” and “D” in "china town."

There is of course overlap with other chapters, but these are the ones I focused on.

The stories are meant to work chronologically. Beginning with Leon Orcot’s over exuberant going after Count D, moving to D’s revisiting a client, followed by a college age Chris Orcot (Leon’s younger brother) reflecting on his time with D, and finally ending again with Leon and an exploration of his time looking for D as referenced in the end of the last volume.

 

**nothing but a clown**

In “nothing but a clown” we see Leon seeing how the detective noir genre treats Asian cultures, particularly Chinese culture. I drew from Homay King’s _Lost in Translation_ and Karen Lynch’s “Orientation vs Orientalism,” for looking at the treatment of Chinatown and the “Orient” in various film noir movies and Bill Oliver’s “Debunking the Private Eye Tradition,” for how the “hardboiled private eye” functions as a character archetype. Leon Orcot both fits and disidentifies with that archetype.

“He was relatively poor amidst the suburban affluence of Los Angeles; he was bound by Victorian morals though required to deal in his business with the free and easy inhabitants of Sunset Strip; he was possessed of human compassion in a city of hard luck cases waiting to take advantage.”(242) 

While this quote is describing Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe. It fits Matsuri Akino’s Leon Orcot pretty spot on. This came from a section in Oliver’s essay called “The Private Eye as Clown,” which discussed the potential that these hardboiled detective types have to look foolish. Leon Orcot is the ultimate private eye fool, beginning with the fact that’s he’s not even a private eye, he’s a police officer working on a larger police force, not alone. Whenever Leon suspects Count D of something, he’s never the culprit and any attempts to arrest D just see Leon end up looking foolish.

The fic I have written sees Leon encounter film noir and then, fail to see the ironies of it that reflect in his own attempts to arrest and villainize Count D.  In a large more narrative sense in the source materials it reflects a continued inability to police Chinatown in a way that is seen as both comic and kind of ridiculous. Using this trope in such a way allows for disidentification to take place to point out the flaw and problems inherent in the original detective noir trope. 

 

**Of a feather**

“Of a feather,” reexamines the very first chapter of _Pet Shop of Horrors_ and the story of Angelica whose desire for the prettiest, most expensive, and one of a kind exotic birds, and her inability to relent to someone who knows the species better than she does (Count D) simply because she wants it leads to the traumatic discovery that after mating the female with eat the male to provide for the future child. 

In the fic, Count D reflects on humans who want the beautiful exotic animal without taking into consideration difficult or ugly aspects of the animals behavior or even just the amount of care that goes into taking care of these animals. He also pays a visit to Angelica to see how the birds are doing after the chick has hatched. What I hoped to convey that while he has learned some lesson she is still not fully aware of what it means to have an exotic pet. 

The discussions of white exoticization of Chinatown in Barbara Berg;and “Chintown’s Tourist Terrain”and Jane Chi Hyun Park’s “American Anxiety in an Oriental City,” influenced my reading of that first chapter and resultantly the fic I wrote. Angelica has simply learned what she can’t and or shouldn’t do in regard to her exotic pet, but outside of fearing future consequences has she really learned any deeper implications of her desire to have these exotic birds? I think ultimately that is something that is up for the reader to decide. For people who don’t die as a result of mishandling their pets we don’t always see how the persons behavior changed after said lesson. This is my take on how Angelica moved on after the events at the end of “Dream.” I also looked to David Porter’sMonstrous Beauty which deals with how and why Chinese aesthetic has such an appeal to a white western audience.

It is interesting to note also that the bird, the strelitzia, is clearly South Asian not Chinese and it think in a further analysis an interesting case could be made for that representing western blurring of Asian cultures, by someone simply looking for something exotic and “Oriental.” 

 

**The truth about stories**

Chris Orcot is a fascinating character and frankly I could have written a whole essay/fic series with him. Chris Orcot is Leon’s little brother who cannot speak and while he cannot speak, he can see the animals in Count D’s pet shop in their humanesque forms, while Leon can only see them as animals. The animals and Count D can also understand Chris’s thoughts just as though he were speaking aloud. 

I wanted to look at what made Chris different from the customers of D’s shop who could sometimes see the humanesque form of the animals but only until their lesson was learned. I settled on the idea of appreciation versus fetishization. Chris expects nothing from the pet shop except animals there is no ulterior motive in Chris’s ability to see the animals. Unlike the people that D sells pets to who usually can only see the animals in their humanesque forms because there is a lesson they need to learn that is orchestrated through the appearance of the animal as humanesque. 

However, once Chris can speak again and returns to live with his aunt and uncle, he loses his ability to see and communicate with the animals. The fic I wrote, explores, from a college age Chris’s perspective why that might be and how Chris is rationalizing his time in the pet shop.

The sources I have for this are not quite as detailed as for some of the other fics. I relied a lot on prior knowledge of cultural appropriation that I could not trace back to a single source, which while okay for fanfiction doesn’t work quite so well in an academic paper. My big source was Megan Kendrick’s “Virtual Tourisms” site that portrays tourism in 1880/90s Los Angeles, which included Chinatown as a tourism destination. It does rhetorically similar work as Barbara Berglund’s “Chinatown’s Tourist Terrain,” but with a Los Angeles centric focus instead of San Francisco, which I found helpful for _Pet Shop of Horrors_ , because it does take place in Los Angeles. It shows the fetishizing view on Chinatown that I would argue Chris Orcot does not have while he is practically living there, but when he is able to speak again and leaves, he runs the risk of developing more fully the kind of view that Leon approaches Chinatown with. 

I am really attached to Thomas King’s _The Truth About Stories_ and so what I did with in this fic was used storytelling as the framework with which Chris was going to rationalize and figure out his feelings concerning the time he spent in Count D’s pet shop as a kid. Particularly, because storytelling as a framework can not only help to clarify difficult feelings, but it also allows for exploration of “fictions” and “mythologies” that can be seen as frowned upon by strict “fact-based” academia. 

“The truth about stories,” takes place during the twenty year gap from the time Leon disappears and the epilogue of the series of Chris appearing at the pet shop and meeting the new D.

 

**china town**

The last fic in this set of four is simply called “china town.” It, like “the truth about stories,” takes place after the end of the series, but unlike could continue ambiguously past the epilogue. I have not specified a time frame for the fic and it could happen as slowly or as quickly as the reader would like to interpret. 

This fic is primarily driven by Barbara Berglund’s “Chinatown’s Tourist Terrain,” and Homay King’s _Lost in Translation._ While looking for D after his disappearance Leon comes to terms with his position as a police officer in relationship to the history of the police’s presence in Chinatown and his desire to do things differently than Vesca Howell, the FBI agent who was after D’s father in a similar yet more intense way than Leon was attempting to arrest D. 

His experiences at the end of volume 10 in the confrontation with the three Ds, would I think considerably change how he views the world and as a result potentially change how he approaches looking for D after D disappears. After all, according to Chris, “Leon, left to return something to Count D,” (Vol 10). That’s not remotely in the same vein as disappearing to chase Count D to the ends of the earth to arrest him.

**Author's Note:**

> While I have included the works cited for each individual fic, I am posting the full list here.
> 
> References
> 
> Akino, Matsuri, Pet Shop of Horrors. Vol. 1-10. Tokyopop, 2008.
> 
> Lee, Erika. “Orientalisms in the Americas: A hemispheric approach to Asian American history.” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 8 no. 3, 2005, pp. 235-256. 
> 
>  
> 
> nothing but a clown:
> 
> King, Homay. Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier. Duke University Press, 2010.
> 
> Lynch, Karen. “Orientation vs Orientalism: Chinatown in Detective Narratives.” Popular Culture Review, vol. 11, no. 1, Feb. 2000, pp. 13-30.
> 
> Oliver, Bill. “‘The Long Goodbye; and ‘Chinatown’: Debunking the Private Eye Tradition.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 3, 1975, pp. 240-248. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43795624. 
> 
> of a feather:
> 
> Berglund, Barbara. “Chinatown’s Tourist Terrain: Representation and Recialization in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco.” American Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, 2005, pp. 5-36. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40643847.
> 
> Park, Jane Chi Hyun. “American Anxiety in the Oriental City.” Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema, University of Minnesota Press, 2010, pp. 51-81.
> 
> Porter, David. “Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of the Chinese Taste.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 3, 2002, pp. 395-411. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30054206.
> 
>  
> 
> the truth about stories:
> 
> Chan, David. “L.A’s Secret Chinatown Has Only One Restaurant Left - but New Neighbors Are Arriving.” L.A. Weekly, 12 Oct. 2017, www.laweekly.com/restaurants/the-gentrification-of-las-secret-old-chinatown-8526006.
> 
> Kendrick, Megan. “Virtual Tourisms.” Virtual Tourisms, USC Department of History, 2008, vectors.usc.edu/issues/06_issue/virtualtourisms/.
> 
> King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. House of Anansi Press, 2011.
> 
>  
> 
> china town:
> 
> Allan, Nigel John Roger, and Vasily Mikhaylovich Sinitsyn. “Kunlun Mountains.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 6 Mar. 2017, www.britannica.com/place/Kunlun-Mountains. 
> 
> Berglund, Barbara. “Chinatown’s Tourist Terrain: Representation and Recialization in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco.” American Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, 2005, pp. 5-36. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40643847.
> 
> King, Homay. Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier. Duke University Press, 2010.
> 
> Kirk, Kamala. “The 10 Best Chinatowns in the United States.” Tripping, Tripping, 15 June 2017, www.tripping.com/explore/the-10-best-chinatowns-in-the-united-states.


End file.
